The present article investigates co-decision making with focus on the development of partnerships arrangements (PAs) between managers and trade-union representatives in a Danish multinational company which has grown through cross-border mergers and acquisitions. The findings show the difficulties which trade-union representatives and management face in combining different forms of corporate governance and supporting PAs. The article argues that hybrid forms of PAs are unlikely to develop, due to historically embedded governance institutions, which create distinct expectations about how a firm must be controlled and who has the rights to exert this control.

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The present article investigates changes over time in the patterns of co-decisionmaking in a Danish multinational company which has grown through cross-border mergers and acquisitions. The findings show the difficulties that trade union representatives face when firms try to introduce a governance regime based on shareholder value ideology. The article argues that hybrid forms of governance are unlikely to develop due to historically embedded governance institutions, which create distinct expectations about how a firm must be governed and who has the right to participate in this governance. The spread of the Anglo-Saxon model of governance in Europe is likely to have negative effects on co-decision-making processes and established patterns of organizational cooperation.

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In recent years, the concept of international competitiveness has (re)emerged as a paradigm in public discourse. In this paper I introduce the concept of institutional competitiveness to show how the concept of international competition has been reformulated as part of a political project for initiating economic globalization. It is my intention to show how the concept of institutional competitiveness (CIC) has raised to become important in the last 25 years, moving from a simple conversation among academics into a political discussion with real-world effects. The purpose of the paper is to describe the rise and movement into the realm of practice. The purpose is also to show how the voyage has come to include institutional change as an important policy instrument and the use of institutional analysis as a key utensil for policy makers. It is my claim that discourses and institutions are used with the intention to enhance the competitiveness of nations and enterprises; why discourses and institutions have become a political phenomenon of interest and salience for policy makers and decision takers. It is also my claim that knowledge of institutions is applied to explain economic growth and to assess the potential relevance of institutional reforms; why interpretations of institutions has been become a policy tool for the implementation of globalisation. It is this dual role of discourses and institutions I describe in the following. The whole debate on the CIC will be looked upon as an example of how institutions (as a political phenomenon) and institutional analysis (as a policy tool) have become part of a policy approach. Two caveats are necessary. It is not my ambition to describe the conflicts of interests and the accidents of history involved in moving the process from dawn to mid-day. Neither is it my ambition to explain why the travel has happened in the first place. Even if the process is engulfed in conflicts – at several levels and including multiple interests – I will NOT identify these, nor describe them. The purpose of the paper is only to describe not to explain. The paper will be organised as follows. First, I describe how the concept of national and institutional competitiveness is discussed. In order to describe how the concept of competitiveness has been redefined over the past 20-25 years I include literature from economic theory and business analysis (Aiginger 2006b; Siggel 2006). It is in this context that the concept of Institutional Competitiveness is introduced. Second, I trace the institutionalization of the discussion into expert systems. Two examples will be emphasized. One is the development of "The post-Washington consensus” another is The Open Method of Coordination within the EU. The presentation is based on a reading of policy papers, reports and other primary sources from international organizations and national governments. Third, I point to how the institutionalization has included a number of welfare reforms and ignited a process towards the transformation of national welfare states. I draw on primary and secondary literature in presenting the concept of competition state (Cerny 1990, 2007; Stopford et al 1991; Jessop 1994, 2003; Hirsch 1995; but also Rosecranze 1999; Bobbit 2002; Weiss 2003). Fourth, and finally, I emphasize how state-society relations have been changed. The concept of competitive corporatism (Rhodes 1998; Molina & Rhodes 2002) is employed.

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This inaugural address is a welcome opportunity to call your attention to a new area of research that the International Center for Business and Politics has chosen as one of five areas of special interest. By referring to this area of focus as"institutional competition in the media market" we also signal an approach that will be free of much of the traditional dogma in Danish media research: First of all, we will consider the media as a market for opinion, goods and services – not primarily as a cultural discourse with a singular focus on public service. Secondly, we consider media activity from a social science / leadership perspective – not from the perspective of a journalist or from the ideologically critical perspective of the license payer. Thirdly, we consider competition in the media market as an institutional phenomenon that is not solely conditioned by economic considerations. We aim to find a third way between economic determinism and the optimism of political regulation. The media enterprise as institutionalized practice is, from our perspective, placed at the intersection of the marketplace and politics. We recognize that the daily press, radio and television in Denmark have emerged from a tradition based upon ideals of freedom of expression, democracy and the enlightenment of the general public. At the same time we stress the fact that the media worldwide is Big Business – and that this reality has an increasing effect on Danish competitiveness and business development in general. Not only as a channel for opinion, but as a political actor and a potential business locomotive in the so-called culture- and experience-economy.

Despite high taxes, a large state budget and welfare state, much economic regulation, and a very open economy, Denmark continues to compete successfully against the other advanced capitalist economies. Hence, Denmark presents a paradox for neoliberalism, which predicts that these policies will hurt national competitiveness under conditions of economic globalization. Following the varieties of capitalism literature, this paper argues that Denmark’s success has been based in large part on its institutional competitiveness–its capacity to achieve socioeconomic success as a result of the competitive advantages that firms derive from operating within a particular set of political and economic institutions. The institutional basis for successfully coordinating labor markets, vocational training and skill formation programs, and industrial policy are examined for Denmark and the United States—two countries that are very different institutionally. The analysis shows that there is no one best way to achieve success in today’s global economy, except perhaps for reducing socioeconomic inequality; that the type of capitalism known as coordinated market economies are oversimplified in the literature; and that high taxes, state spending, and economic regulation can actually enhance socioeconomic performance.

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This paper examines the influence of European integration on the relationship between state administration and private interests in the four Nordic countries – Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. By private interests I mean interest organizations, private corporations and independent experts. The paper focuses exclusively on the national policy processes that are involved with managing European Union (EU) issues. More specifically, this paper discusses two aspects of multi-level governance. First is the important role of private interests in the coordination of decision making at the national level preceding their government’s representation of national interests in the European Council of Ministers and other EU organizations. Second is the effect of all this on national democratic systems.

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Professionals and organizations both seek to exploit and cooperate with each other. Professionals
seek alliances in their own peer networks while organizations do the same. These networks carry
not only information that inform incentives but norms about appropriate forms of governance
and practices that guide how they actually work. In this paper we outline how professionals and
organizations operate in two-level networks through a focus on issue control over issues of
transnational governance. As such, this interdisciplinary paper brings together insights from
Organization Studies and International Relations to discuss how professionals and organizations
battle over issue control through the designation of tasks and the creation of overlapping
networks. We outline the emergence of ‘issue professionals’ and how they attempt network
management. We do so via a case on transnational sustainability certification that demonstrates
how issue professionals are engaged in two-level networks.

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Comparative political economy has been dominated since the 1970s by two waves of research. The first one examined how different types of policy-making regimes affect policy making and, in turn, national economic competitiveness (e.g., Katzenstein 1978). The second one studied how different types of production regimes affect national competitiveness (e.g., Hall and Soskice 2001). Absent from all of this is much discussion about knowledge regimes. Knowledge regimes are sets of actors, organizations, and institutions that produce and disseminate policy ideas that affect how policy-making and production regimes are organized and operate in the first place. Knowledge regimes are important because they contribute data, research, theories, policy recommendations, and other ideas that influence public policy and, thus, national economic competitiveness (Baab 2001; Campbell 1998; Pedersen 2006).

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This paper develops the concept of knowledge regime and shows how knowledge regimes
vary across the two most basic varieties of capitalism: liberal and coordinated market economies. The key
questions motivating this paper are whether there are different types of knowledge regimes associated with
different varieties of capitalism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; how they generate
policy ideas; and how they disseminate these ideas to policy makers. Hence, this paper begins to fill an
important blind spot in the comparative political economy and varieties of capitalism literatures.

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Who drives domestic institutional change in the face of international economic crisis? For rationalists the answer is powerful self-interested actors who struggle for material gains during an exogenously generated crisis. For economic constructivists it is ideational entrepreneurs who use ideas as weapons to establish paths for institutional change during crisis-driven uncertainty. Both approaches are elite-centric and conceive legitimacy as established by command or proclamation. This article establishes why domestic institutional change in response to international economic constraints must be legitimated by non-elites and how their everyday actions alter policy paths established in crisis. This is illustrated by re-examining a case frequently associated with punctuated equilibrium theories of crisis and institutional change: interwar Britain. In contrast to conventional explanations, I argue that the "legitimacy gap" between elite and broader public understandings about how the economy should work informed institutional experimentation during the 1920s and 1930s and fertilized the "Keynesian Revolution" of the 1940s.

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In this paper technical standardisation is understood and explained in a model where economic analysis is coupled with an analysis of the political system as proposed in rational choice theory. The aim is to answer both the question why various countries (e.g. the United States versus European countries) let either the market or public intervention determine the mode of technical standardisation and the possible implications of these two ways of organizing technical standardisation from an economic and a political point of view. Based upon the analysis of the paper a couple of general policy recommendations are made concerning the mode of technical standardisation.
Keywords: Rational choice, market failures, technical standards, standardisation, government failures.

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A Route to a New Negotiating Order in High Performance Work Organizations?

Hull Kristensen, Peer(Frederiksberg, 2010)

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Contrary to a widely held view, rather than seeing the certification of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) as a barrier to increasing employee participation, this article views new ways of structuring participation as a necessary step towards making improvements in OHS management systems. The article first considers how work organization has changed and then in a similar way traces how bargaining has shifted from being distributive to become integrative to create a fundamental change in the negotiation regime. Finally, by analysing an OHS-certified firm in greater depth, the article shows how solutions for improvements in OHS management and notable bottom-up formulations of OHS benchmarks may help us discover how the organizational form of firms in which high-performance work organization can be developed through new participative structures.

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Lessons to be learned from the "hidden” committees of the Nordic Council of Ministers

Nedergaard, Peter(København, 2006)

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In spite of their long history and extensive activities, the international committees of the Nordic Council of Ministers have not hitherto been subject to scholarly examination. This paper demonstrates that valuable lessons can be learned about policy learning in practise and theoretically by analysing the cooperation in the committees of the Nordic Council of Ministers. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework as the starting point, fifteen hypotheses on policy learning are tested. Among other things, it is concluded that in order to maximise policy learning in international committees, committees should avoid fragmentation into coalitions, be open to public opinion, participants in committees should be driven by a sense of purpose rather that material interest, empirical data should be made available to committees, a neutral presidency should be present in order to act as an authoritative persuader, and neutral scientists should participate, although not necessarily scientists from consultancy firms.

Over the last three decades, EU regulation of the internal market has become highly pervasive,
affecting practically all the domains of European citizens’ lives. Many studies have focused on
understanding the process and causes of regulatory reform. However, these have typically been
small-scale or small-n studies, with no or limited attempts to analyse the more general sources of
regulatory reform. In this paper, we focus on the determinants of stability and change in EU
regulation. We develop an original dataset of 169 pieces of legislation (regulations, directives and
decisions) across eight different sectors, and analyse the dynamics of regulatory reform in the EU.
Using time series analysis of count data, we find evidence that the number of winning coalitions in
the Council and the size of EU membership have a significant impact on regulatory reform in the
EU. However, the political (left-right) composition of EU’s legislative bodies has no significant
impact on the process of regulatory reform.

Quasi-public institutions are significant but unsung players in the contemporary international financial order. What can be understood as quasi-public institutions (QPIs) have been created by states or private associations to provide a means of mediating private capital with public value, typically attracting domestic and international investment in order to foster and further a domestic agenda that has strong support from the broader population. As such they fit awkwardly with common perceptions of the international political economy as dominated institutions that reflect either state or market interests. QPIs do both and have emerged as institutional responses to domestic crises that then go on to have a role in shaping the world economy. QPIs that issue collaterized securities from mortgage credit, be they public or private in origin, reflect this institutional form given that their purpose is to bring together private capital and public value. This purpose also makes QPIs sensitive to everyday politics, given that they were created to reflect a broad social purpose rather than only elite interests. This article discusses the development of QPIs for mortgage bonds in a liberal market economy, the U.S., and a coordinated market economy, Denmark. I suggest that QPIs’ values have been challenged by de-regulatory and re-regulatory trends in recent decades. I suggest that QPIs call upon us to question how we identify actors in the international financial order as either public or private, and the importance of everyday politics in fostering institutional innovations that have significant knock-on effects for the world economy.

This article discusses how institutional competitiveness and multinationals are mutually enriching concepts. Seen from the perspective of Multinationals, institutional competitiveness becomes expressed at two levels. At the level of corporate HQs institutional competitiveness proves itself by forming firms capable of expanding internationally. At the level of subsidiaries as providing institutional back up for these firms’ abilities to fight for survival and growth within the frame of rivalling subsidiaries of the MNC. The article discusses at these two levels the comparative institutional competitiveness of Liberal Market Economies and Coordinated Markets Economies under the current competitive regime.